Open dictionary update

In case you haven’t checked in on it lately, the Kids Open Dictionary project is going well. We have over 9,200 words defined now.

And we’ve started getting some interesting uptake on usage. We’ve had several folks use the glossary builder for online courses and other classroom uses. (If you send us a word list, we’re happy to prioritize any undefined words for completion.)

There is also a new mobile app built on words and definitions from the dictionary — it’s called Mobictionary and runs on Windows Phone 7. We love it!  (And we’d sure love to see future versions for iOS and Android!) It’s free so if you have a Windows Phone 7, check it out!

If you have ideas of your own for how to use the open dictionary, let us know. Remember it’s completely free and public domain.

And if you have a chance, stop by and define a word or two.

P2PU: Evaluating applications

So I’ve finished going through all the applications for my Entrepreneurial Marketing course and notified everyone of their enrollment status (or at least I hope I have).

Having to choose was not easy. Having to send “sorry you didn’t get in messages” was worse. As was receiving  “can’t you let more people in” messages back. (Here was my response. Ugh.)

Some general notes of interest:

  • I got a total of 84 applications. Of those, only 3 were so brief or incomplete that I didn’t even score them. My original class size was set at 25. I ended up accepting 41.
  • The most popular entrepreneurial enterprises folks are looking at include: Web 2.0 and other technical pursuits (like other open ed projects, P2PU seems skewed that way), web design and/or photography, health/nutrition, and music. There were also a handful of NGOs, non-profits, and personal passions/pursuits.
  • Commonly cited examples of effective marketing given in the sign-up task included Apple, Facebook, and fast food in general.

I read all the applications and scored them, but also kept a notes field and a field to indicate my more subjective feeling about the applications (including a go or no go in some cases). After totaling the scores and sorting, the vast majority of the applicants that I had subjectively thought would be strong participants also scored well. There were a few that for one reason or another didn’t. Most of these I added in anyway.

Things I would do differently next time:

  • Publish the scoring rubric with the sign-up task
  • Better manage communications with applicants (I tried to notify people when I got their applications, but the number of applications and the dynamics of the internal messaging system on P2PU tripped me up, and I was never sure I got to everyone or didn’t message some twice.)
  • Consider adding a sign-up task question geared toward peer learning, e.g. “How or what do you think you can contribute to this class as a peer learning experience?” This might be a good way to emphasize the peer learning aspect which not everyone seemed to really get. (I did add this to my rubric scoring but it was not always obvious since I didn’t ask a specific question.)
  • Ask people to spell out acronyms. I spent a fair amount of time researching stuff I didn’t know…a good learning experience, but…. (I will do this in the course intro as well and ask folks to ASK if they don’t know what something is.)

I liked being able to add comments to the applications (but unfortunately have been unable to figure out how to view these as a participant — I’m still looking). I think this could be a way to help people refine their learning objectives for the course even before it started.

P2PU: The week before class starts and I’m am psyched!

So I’m designing and facilitating a new course on Peer2Peer University (P2PU) that I am really super excited about. I’ve been wanting to blog about it, but between the course set-up and several other projects, I’ve been swamped. So please excuse the brevity and possible lack of coherence as I get a few thoughts down. I’ll write more as the course progresses.

Entre_Mktg-sm

1. Why am I doing this?

I have a lot of reasons. First, I believe in OER and have committed to spending time on it (especially to increase actual use of OER). Second, I love the subject I’m doing a course on (Entrepreneurial Marketing) and think I have some insights to share. Third, I want to explore “open learning” as a larger approach beyond just OER. (This is perhaps the murkiest goal but the one that I feel like I have made real progress on so far.) Fourth, I love working with adult learners — they are motivated and energetic and always teach me so much! Finally, and most selfishly, I want to get some more online course facilitation under my belt with the possible plan of teaching in a more formal (paying?) setting in the future.

2. What is different about P2PU?

The core values of P2PU are openness, peer learning, and collaboration. I also think it is all about individualization. With a course like mine, people bring very different previous experiences, needs, and motivations. I’ve tried to structure in a lot of options on assignments and even readings.

The biggest thing that’s different about P2PU is the idea that there is no “teacher” — we’re all learning together. Very authentic…and fun. I’m stretching my brain to think about how you design for this. Less content, more good questions and tasks to get at individual objectives. I’m doing stuff like design-your-own projects. It’s been a struggle to cut down on “presenting content.” We’ll see how it works.

3. What is the course management system like for P2PU?

Very basic. If you are thinking Moodle, this isn’t it. It’s more like wiki pages and use-whatever-communication-tools-you-want. I think there are pros and cons to this, but it is working just fine for me. (I also think that they are working on a new course system.) Here is the course design handbook for those who want more info.

The development is very community drive. I’ve been too swamped to do much beyond scan the listservs but it’s all very public and seems to be consensus driven.

For my course, I’m mostly using the built-in forums for communications, figuring that folks can link to blogs or whatever if they want. I’m not doing any synchronous web conferencing, but am having online “office hours” with a suggested topic for those who want to participate.

4. Is it hard to get applicants, and what are they like?

I was pleasantly surprised that having done almost no marketing of the course, I got a ton of really high quality applications. The people who applied almost without exception did a great job of thinking through and answering three questions as a “sign-up task” (essential component to screen applicants). As I’ve read the applications, I’ve thought Wow, these are people I’m really excited about learning with! And I even had people lobbying me to let them in the class — “Please pick me.” Seriously, that is so great!

5. How big should my class be?

I think this varies for every course and every facilitator. For myself, I felt that 25 was a good number that I could meaningfully collaborate with.

Then I got flooded with applications — and really good ones — and decided to up the number. I’m looking at maybe 30-35 now, but we’ll see. I know that some people will sign up and then not participate, but it’s hard to gauge how many.

Previous course designers suggested that you could manage more participants by asking for co-facilitators and dividing up the work. I’m not sure that would work for me. I might think about it more next time, but not on the first round.

6. How am I assessing the applicants?

I’ve made a rubric with 0-10 points for each of the three sign-up tasks questions, and then minus a point if they’ve signed up for a ton of other courses, plus a point or two if they’ve communicated with me outside of the application/sign-up tasks, plus a point if they’ve set up a profile in P2PU, and plus a few points if they seem like they will be good collaborators and have a lot to offer the class.

Any thoughts anyone has on any of the above are most appreciated. This is somewhat of a grand experiment for me.

Dreaming about open

I have always been an active dreamer, frequently dreaming solutions or ideas related to projects I am working on. I have been known to dream system designs, entire term papers,  and even architectural plans. While these ideas often seem brilliant when I am first awake, by light of day, they often seem less so.

Lately, I have been immersed in a project on Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU), an online learning environment for motivated adult learners with an emphasis on openness, peer learning, and community. To that list of core values, I would add self-personlization.

Last night, I dreamed about this:

Open Business School

Tag line: Because your learning shouldn’t be constrained to what they think is important

or Because you know best what you need to learn

The idea is a business school on P2pU for entrepreneurs, in particular for those for whom it doesn’t make sense to go to traditional business school (arguably most entrepreneurs). The curriculum would include a variety of courses in traditional business areas, such as marketing, finance, management, etc. but with a strong slant toward open learning.

To me, that means:

  • Lots of learner choices (in terms of courses, focus areas, projects, etc.)
  • Very hands-on
  • Less content and more scaffolding and resources to choose from to guide one’s own learning

Done right, this is profoundly different from how most schools operate.

So then, after waking up, I thought, hey, what about this same idea for a school of education? Many in ed reform have bemoaned the short comings of traditional pre-service education and in-service professional development. Importantly, it doesn’t model the values of the new participatory model of education that we hope teachers will follow. A new P2PU Open School of Education could change all that. (I’m going to write more about this in a future post.)

It’s now about six hours after I woke up from dreaming this idea, and it still seems pretty good to me. Perhaps it is not a very big idea, but for me,  it is a new way of grokking “open” that is exciting.

Biz models for OER

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past couple years thinking about business models for OER in K-12. (As an entrepreneur who has worked in education for 15 years but was trained in business, it’s just where my mind goes.)

Given the fact that OERs are not free to develop or implement and that it takes a lot of money to get a K-12 program in use (even if its’ “free”; you can thank the system that the textbook publishers and the states have established for that), there needs to be a solid business model to get OER successfully used in K-12.

I’ve settled in to a model that offers core assets (in this case, basic content) free under an open license and also offers additional optional upgrades on a pay-per model  (ala Red Hat, etc.). This makes sense to me, not only from the standpoint of an OER start-up but also from that of an educational user.

But what I don’t have in mind here is a model in which the only free, open-licensed version is a scaled-down trial or demo version.  And I’m seeing way too much of this lately.

Here are a couple examples. I was using a textbook from Flatworld Knowledge (an organization I have enormous respect for) and was prompted to pay for printing a PDF on my own printer. Really? This seems to be taking the pay-extra-for-premium-services model a little too far. This CC BY NC SA book has been published in a PDF that is embedded with Flash via Scribd such that it can’t be downloaded or printed (easily at least).

printforpay

Now I understand the business reasons for charging extra for premium services, but this can’t be what was intended by anyone who intended this as an “open” venture. (Remixing this would be a gargantuan pain in the ass.)

Another example is DimDim, a piece of software licensed under GPL. If you didn’t know this is (was?) open source software, you would never know it from their web site. They promote a “free trial.” If you dig in and really look at the options, there is a scaled back version for individuals that is free.

There is a vigorous discussion of this issue on their Sourceforge page, on which people allege that the company “used the open source idea long enough to generate revenue” and that “even their own sales people have admitted that they are no longer supporting the community version, which is in total violation of the GPL license under which it was originally created.”

These are the sorts of problems that users have with free, proprietary software and that open source software (or open licensed content) is supposed to avoid.

Both of these examples cause me concern with regard to the “slippery slope” of an OER business model that tries to support an open-licensed core product with pay-per services. If someone isn’t keeping in mind the core values of “open,” the model will quickly erode to something that is virtually indistinguishable from proprietary commercial products.